Jan 18, 2017 | Blog - Mary Marcus
A big crowd of us was waiting for the E train in Jamaica a couple of days ago. They’d opened the doors, unlocked the turnstiles and we poured in diverted from the Long Island Railroad. Though I have passed through Queens a couple of hundred times or more throughout the years, other than JFK, I have only stood on solid ground in Queens three times that I can remember: two funerals and one bar mitzvah.
People were grumbling. I stood next to a tall handsome middle-aged man with a very expensive haircut who was truly pissed.
“I could have taken a limo,” he said looking around him with contempt.
“An hour!” I heard someone else cry out indignantly.
Jamaica, which is a few stops away from Penn Station if you are riding the railroad, is a long way to the city if you are taking the E Train in.
And here it was… The E. We crammed our way in. I saw the handsome man shove someone out of a seat and sit himself down, scowling. When the door closed, I was standing with a group around a pole, holding on.
Six of us: myself, three younger women, in their twenties all chatting with a boy-man, a little pudgy with baggy jeans and very large feet. He was mostly talking to someone behind me.
The boy had the sweetest face, beatific really. When I looked at him and smiled, he gave me a little windshield wiper wave, as children do. I wondered which of the women was his mother. It looked more likely that they were older sisters.
I turned around. Holding on in back of me was, someone who might have inhabited the sideshows of my childhood in the tent next to Mississippi Flo, the fattest woman in the world.
This woman wasn’t fat. She was about my height, maybe a little shorter, and her hair was normal, straight and brown. It was all I could do not to turn away. Her skin looked like it had been boiled. It was covered in welts and powdered to hide its redness. One eye was permanently shut, yet she was smiling. Her teeth were caved in and there was more than one row of them on top. Her one good eye was buried deep in its socket. I knew in a flash everyday people must look at her in horror. The very opposite of the way people look at a beautiful person, but she had great composure, this woman hanging on to the pole. With such a face, she was used to embarrassment, used to God knows what. I was determined not to turn away.
“Is the boy you are talking to as sweet as he looks?” I asked her.
She smiled. “He’s an angel!” she declared. By now I was getting used to the way she looked.
We counted the stops together, the girls, the boy, the woman and I. When we were at ten stops still alas, in the heart of Queens, I remembered an incident in my childhood. I was about the angel boy’s age: the awkward stage when childhood and puberty each have something not so attractive to display in the body. Like the little boy, I had endured a pudgy stage. And my father who was fat, used to tell me I was fat.
One day, things began to change; I sort of had a waist. I went to school in a brand new jumper that buttoned up the front. It was a black watch plaid and I had a nice crisp white cotton shirt underneath it. When I looked in the mirror I was certain I was no longer a freak. Or even close to a freak. My sister had even in a rare show of comradeship rolled my dark curly mass into something resembling real hair. Not dark hay.
I was sitting behind a boy named John, JB he called himself, whom I had a crush on. I sat down and he turned around, and I waited expectantly.
I was nine years old. JB looked at me, glanced down and told me he wouldn’t go out with me if I were the last girl in the world. He said it in those words. And to this very moment, I’ll never forget how it felt.
The woman sharing the pole with me had never outgrown her ugly duckling stage. It would take a certain amount of greatness just to come to terms with that. And not be destroyed.
We had reached Manhattan by this point. Civilization! East 50th. I remembered from other lives that I could walk across the platform and get the B train and not even have to go to Penn Station where I’d just be heading uptown once again.
I said goodbye to the happy group discussing where they were going to have dinner before the Billy Joel concert.
I thought then, the pitiful looking woman was the real angel. I can see her in my mind’s eye, her boiled face, her three rows of top teeth, and what shines through is her good spirit, her calm vibration.
In my mind’s eye she’s flapping her puffy angel wings.
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Jan 6, 2017 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I fell off the sugar wagon in September, after a two-year hiatus. Not in any kind of bing-y way. Yet, to this very minute, I feel the siren call of cane and fructose that doesn’t really happen when you avoid the stuff and limit your consumption to fruit, and not too much dried fruit either, and the natural sort that comes in yoghurt, kefir, milk, and all lactose products. It started at my friend Mae’s wedding in September. A big piece of wedding cake, not ordinary white and gluey, her and John’s was spice cake with raisins and nuts and a beautiful white icing. Months later, I can still recall that cake which was proffered after the ceremony with a cold glass of good champagne (more sugar, alcohol and sugar—whoopee!). Next came a piece of iced gingerbread imported from home by my German friend, Andrea! Eaten with a hot cup of earl grey on a cold afternoon. Paradise! But alas, once you get that sweet taste of cane or fructose, your mind’s pleasure centers want more. And more. Tell me about it. I used to smoke. It was a years long battle to get that monkey off my back. And sugar is the same: dope, a signal to the nervous system and the pleasure centers to go into zing mode. Soothe me! Feed me! Once you get the taste, it’s hell to turn off. I’m guessing it’s like booze if booze is your thing, and thank God it’s not mine. I want to shovel the stuff in my system. And if you’re skinny like I am, everyone looks at you like you are some kind of freak if you don’t stuff it in. If you ask for the cookie without the flour and sugar, I’m labeled a Miz Priss; I’m told a cookie would do me good; I could use a little flab on my bones. What’s wrong with me, I look unhealthy. It’s getting a little ridiculous.
Recently my husband, who has always been able to eat anything he wants and remain relatively slender told me after I gave him the look at a holiday dinner party when he reached for a second slice of cake: “My wife is the reincarnation of Cotton Mather. In her last life, she sentenced people who ate cake to the stake, men, women and children burned!”
“Chill out!” He concluded and everyone at the dinner party in turn gave me the look and nodded their heads.
No I won’t chill out. And neither will gentle (informed) readers whilst perusing the pages of The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes, an eminent science journalist who links the worldwide pandemic of Diabetes to the consumption of sugar, with the US in the lead—both in sick men women and especially children. We started this whole damn thing. We gave the world high fructose corn syrup, soft drinks and Donald Trump who my son told me is a big Oreo freak. Imagine with all he gets to choose from, and he picks Oreos as a treat. It says everything about him. Everything and more.
I was raised in the south on coke cola, pronounced as one word. It was everywhere and consumed hourly by everyone. Babies drank coke cola from their bottles.
Our bodies were not meant to consume the sugar that we feed it. The pancreas can’t take the onslaught. The result of which are epic rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, the lamentable list goes on and on.
Read this remarkable book. The author, I have to say, looks a little stern and gaunt in his author photo. I bet he never falls off the wagon. I bet he’s way worse than Cotton Mather or me at dinner parties. I don’t even like to think of what a treat around his house might be. Or how he punishes his significant others not to mention his offspring if they are caught using the stuff.
My mother, who was diabetic, and who died of the disease started me on the lifelong fear of sugar. I’m way older than she was when she died. And why? She wasn’t obese, she didn’t look like a wild sugar freak, but her drug of choice (apart from dex, opoids and seconal) was sweets. She ate hamburgers, French fries and washed the whole thing down with milkshakes followed by pie. A fried one if she could get it.
She’d chow down. Shoot herself up with insulin and often as not go into shock. After years of this, her body shut down, she was half blind and had to sit in a wheelchair. And then she died, poor mother, and never got to meet my darling son.
I fear that fate befalling me, if I eat more than one cookie. Yes, I am a true phobe. An Uberphobe.
But according to The Case Against Sugar, I’m far from nuts. I don’t need biofeedback or a nice slice of pie. What I need is a megaphone, because all these years I was right! Don’t go near the stuff. Avoid it like the plague.
I’m about to get down on my hands and knees and pray for release from the devil’s food: SUGAR.
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Dec 28, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I read this morning in the NYT that Robert Durst; a.k.a. Bobby went on trial today for the murder of my former sort-of friend Susan Berman.
Img via NYT
She and I must have been more simpatico than I knew. A couple of years ago, when my publisher told me I should start blogging, the very first one I wrote was about Susan. That was before the HBO mini series wherein Durst all but admitted his culpability. Though not before the movie that came out that was more about Durst and his relationship with his wife who disappeared and whose body has never shown up.
Susan would love all this attention. She would be totally comfortable with all eyes on her. She probably should have been an actress not a writer; she came alive when all eyes were focused on her.
It said in the article in the last years of her life she was down on her luck and out of work. And that was the phase when I knew her. She had already blown the money she inherited from her father the gangster; and the book deal and the movie projects. She was living in some house without heat in Benedict Canyon, one I never saw, though during our brief friendship she often came to my house to dinner. She was writing WOM-JEPS, as she called them that paid by the word.WOM-JEPS is an acronym for Women In Jeopardy. I read one of them, the heroine whose father was a dead gangster, as Susan’ father had been, was running away from someone who was trying to murder her. Was that someone Bobby Durst who is charged with her murder? Did she know her life was in danger? Or was she just nuts from worry about money, feeding her dogs, feeding herself?
Susan was older than my sister, who basically came from a different generation. The one that didn’t do drugs. And though they misbehaved just as much—if not more—than people my age, were brought up not to flaunt it like we were.
Susan liked the fact that I ran a fairly tight ship at home and that my son had good manners. I think we were even doing Shabbat in those days, as it was the years my son was going to Sunday school. And I have a faint memory of some challah and my son with a little bird voice saying the prayers and Susan’s little dogs quivering on her lap.
She always brought her dogs with her everywhere, the dogs whose paws were covered in blood and whose barking their heads off after the murder alerted the police.
Susan recommended me for two jobs, neither one of which panned out, but both had come her way, and she didn’t want to do either of them. The first one with Sid Luft, one of Judy Garland’s ex-husbands and I went for the interview. Luft was an old man and he had cancer. He needed a ghost for this book deal he had gotten. And we got along really well. Halfway through the interview his gorgeous new wife walked in. She was years younger than I was and back then I was pretty young. Luft continued to call me for a couple of years and referred to me as the ghost girl. He reminded me of my garmento uncles. He died. I never got to do his book.
The other one was an expose of soviet orphans who had affectional disorder.
After Susan was murdered, I thought about writing a mystery roughly based on the murder, but I was afraid of Bobby Durst, who had turned up dressed as a woman and who had gotten off killing and decapitating someone else and was running free. I don’t know how in my fantasy Bobby Durst would come and get me, or even how everybody always knew Durst probably killed Susan.
But I remember my son calling me from college when the news came out. He really had liked Susan who knew how to handle young boys, who knew how to handle practically anyone! She was a great flirt. And a very seductive person, though I was always, why I don’t know, immune to her charm.
But was I really? All these years later, I still think of her, whether or not a trial is going on, whether or not Durst gets off yet again.
I think of her, and I feel guilty I didn’t do something to help her not get murdered. I ask myself whether I would have been more accommodating had she not been so down and out?
She haunts me. That cold dark night. The dogs barking. That long horrifying moment when the mobster’s daughter opened up the door and knew her number was up.
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Dec 12, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I’ve never seen anyone besides Laszlo selling cheese at the Saturday market in Santa Monica. But yesterday, Laszlo wasn’t behind the little stand with the banner of the goat, and the amazing cheeses. A young woman was there instead.
“Where’s Laszlo?”
“He went back to Hungary,” she replied. “He was getting sort of freaked out in America.”
I sighed.
The young woman sighed.
Laszlo is adorable. I always forget he’s Hungarian and think he’s French because he speaks English like a French person and of course sells this amazing goat cheese.
“So are you the new cheese person?”
“Yes,” she replied.
Lately, we’ve been into the crotin that has a layer of what looks like dangerous mould on the outside. Last week when my friend Kady came for lunch, I was so gratified I could bring out this masterpiece whole with two perfect pears for desert.
The new cheese person asked me, what I wanted today. I told her about the fabulous crotin and pear experience and I reached for one of the crotin now. She shook her head at me, took back the cheese and told me the goat Brie would be a much better choice with pears. I put the Brie in my shopping bag and paid her. But I continued to stand there.
“You look so familiar,” I told her.
“You also look familiar,” she replied.
We smiled at each other.
This young woman had dark brown hair, very pale skin, the kind that burns and blushes easily, and greenish blue eyes under straight dark eyebrows. I remembered when I was her age; I had eyebrows just like that. My Grandma had warned me not to pluck them so thin, and never on top, but of course I didn’t listen to her. And now they are not so thick anymore. This strange familiar young woman also had a little ring in her nose. Probably if I was her age, I’d have gone in for nose rings, all kinds of piercings.
“Where are you from? You sound vaguely ESL. But not entirely.”
“You’re right but not entirely. I was raised by my Grandparents who barely spoke English. They were from Czechoslovakia. Before Hitler, they won the lottery. And were able to get out. They were practically the last Jews to get out of their town.”
I nodded, replied, “My Grandmother was from a little town in Ukraine. They got out because a priest warned my Great Grandfather about a pogrom and he managed to get his family out.”
Now it was her turn to nod. We understood each other in the way that people who have the memory of racial laws in their DNA understand each other: fundamentally and absolutely.
Suddenly it came to me: She looked like me. That’s why she seemed so familiar. She looked like me. She looked like my son. She looked like my brother’s daughter, though not my brother; in fact, she could have been my daughter.
“Do I look like your mother?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “But I was thinking you and I look alike.”
I took off my dark glasses and showed her my eyes.
Same color, same shape. Same eyes.
Our families were the lucky ones. The ones who got away. I thought of all the people who didn’t get away. And weren’t getting away at this very moment in awful places all over the world, even awful places just a few miles from where we stood in grace and safety. It hit me in the face as it does from time to time, the hugeness and the horror of it.
Impulsively I leaned over the cheeses and gave her a hug.
“See you next week!” I said.
Today is Sunday and we had the Brie with pears this afternoon for lunch.
My husband cut into it suspiciously.
“I told him the story about the girl in the market.”
“You should take a picture of her. Then we can put it next to the picture of
you at that age.”
He put some of the Brie on a piece of pear and popped it in his mouth.
Presently he said, “It’s a great story, I love the story, but the other cheese is better.”
“The crotin?”
“Yeah. Get that one next time.”
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Nov 30, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
There’s a guy in a yoga class I like to go to who is, like me, a faithful practitioner.
Probably I’ve known him for ten years in the way one knows people at yoga. The eight years of Obama, the two years before that which in retrospect seems like a sylvan time (relatively).
Everything now for me, and for most everyone I know, is a matter of before and after. The word prelapsarian just about says it all.
Before the fall of man (and woman) though it doesn’t mention the woman part in any dictionary I can find.
This guy has a beautiful practice, one he obviously takes very seriously. He comes into the studio, nips into the men’s dressing area, takes off his jeans, coils his luxuriant chestnut hair that falls down his back into a ballerina bun on top of his head. He reappears in an outfit I can only describe as a sort of adult one-sie. Unlike a baby one-sie, the chest is bare (and hairy), it doesn’t fasten at the crotch, and there are little thin straps. It’s kind of a combination one-sie and over-all made of some knit material. He has them in blue, black, red and green. Out on the street in his jeans with his long hair and beard, he looks like your basic long-haired beefcake. In his one-sie, however, he looks truly strange. Once years ago, when I saw him outside of class, I told him I liked his yoga outfits (because I do). He smiled and told me, “I make them myself.”
Why do I like his odd get-ups? He and they symbolize everything I love about having gotten away from a small town upbringing where a guy with long hair and a beard to this day, wouldn’t be all that comfortable being seen in public with his hair in a ballerina bun, wearing a one-sie made by his own hand.
In my neck of the woods, he can come to class and nobody bats an eye, anymore than eyes are batted when celebrities walk down the streets, or occasionally come to class, it’s part of the culture, part of the scene, we’re all cool, we get it.
The world according to the new regime never will get it. Because they don’t want to get it. They don’t want to yield power they feel they have already lost. Why male power somehow must be linked to control over women is a major problem in my book. But that’s the bottom line: the men get to tell the women what to do, when to do it, and with whom. Men are men. They wear suits, (not one-sies) and women, nice women don’t sleep around, (only men get to do that) and should be punished for pleasure, should smile and always be pleasing to the eye—the male eye—that is beholding them.
Our president elect ran on just such a platform and won. Against a woman, of course.
I was talking about this the other night at a party with a female a little older than my son. I asked her how she supposed just such a man won the presidency.
“Were you surprised?”
“No, not really.”
“Neither was I,” I replied. “But I grew up in the south and I’m more than twenty years older than you.”
“A lot of my friends,” she said. “Read the fifty shades book. Did you?”
“No,” I replied again. “A good friend of mine almost dropped me on account of my sarcastic remarks about that book, this was way before Trump, tell me what’s the connection?”
“The guy in the book, I can’t remember his name, gets to dominate her completely. He’s super rich, he’s super controlling, he ties her up, she’s his special one—and she’s a virgin. It’s his way one hundred percent!”
“I didn’t know the heroine in the book was a virgin,” I replied softly, really in awe of what she said. “But it makes sense.”
Gentle reader, think about it. The fifty shades book explains the 51 percent of the women in this country who voted for Trump.
“Thank you!” I told my younger friend. “You made my day.”
And she did. And she didn’t.
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Nov 18, 2016 | Blog - Mary Marcus
R, who cleans my house once a week, is scared. I told her a couple of weeks ago that he wasn’t going to win and she looked relieved and told me that’s what everyone she works for had told her as well. Mes Patricia, Mes Jenny, Mes this one and that one. I’m sure she still refers to me as Mes Mary to other people even though I have tried to break her of this depressing habit. I remember when people who worked in the house had to call the white folk with the respectful Miz or Mr. before the name.
I don’t want that in my house.
Today, when R unlocked the door she was wide-eyed. I was gone last week right after the election, so it was the first time I’d seen her since the world fell apart for fortunate liberals like myself and less fortunate household workers like R and her family, who have lived here, worked here, paid their dues in every sense of the word and are now scared out of their minds that the wall is going up, and they are out on their butts.
Will this happen? I hope not. If it happens what are people like myself going to do? Will we just stand by and let this happen?
How do “they” plan to implement this? Myself, I am here in America because on my maternal Grandmother’s side, a kindly priest told my Great Grandfather who was a scholar and someone who corrected the Torah, that there was going to be a pogrom. He packed up his family and was gone in a week. All of them. I don’t know any other details other than this.
Yet I am curious about the details. I know, for instance, a little bit of how the Final Solution happened in Eastern Europe. Lists were obtained from (ugh) places like the Jewish Social Service agencies (we know this thanks to scholars like Lucy Davidawitz and Hannah Arendt). Names were turned over, doors were knocked on, people were rounded up. And 90 percent of Jews, gypsies and other undesirables in Europe went up in smoke.
I don’t think “they” are planning anything like a final solution to the immigration problem in this country. But “they” are planning something. We are watching it happen before our very eyes. And most of us, including myself, are doing nothing but wringing our hands.
People I know are marching on Washington. People I know are blabbing on Facebook. People I know are tweeting, going to demonstrations. But as far as I know, no one has come up with a solution from our end.
“They” meanwhile are planning on doing something. What that something is, I don’t rightly know.
R and I are standing in the small front hallway of my house. Henry is jumping up and down barking because he knows when R comes the vacuum cleaner will be on and he hates the sound of the vacuum cleaner more than he hates the sound of a skateboard. Usually we just flee for the morning, my fortunate dog and myself.
“I’m so scared, Mes Mary,” says R. “My daughter she say, what we going to do mommy?”
What are we going to do?
“I’ll help you,” I say, and as we stand there with Henry barking, I realize I will help her. But how much will I help her? I honestly do not know.
Will I hide her and her family? Yes, I decide on the spot, though I don’t say anything. I imagine her moving in my tiny little casa. They can stay in the two rooms downstairs, and we’ll stay upstairs. Henry will learn not to bark at them so much. And we’ll just deal with it. We’ll just deal with it because we have to.
I’ll also, I decide, give her money. But how much money? Like my house, my bank account is small. I can just hear my husband saying, “Marcus, for the love of God—“
I look her in the eye. Henry has calmed down by this point. I take this as a good sign. The front hall is as quiet as a church when no one is praying.
“I’ll help you. We’ll figure it out! I promise!”
R puts one hand on her heart. I clasp the other one.
Our eyes lock, our hands squeeze each other.
I think of the famous lines from The Ethics of the Fathers:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I
And, if not now, when?
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